Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Hello world!

Hi, I started this blog to let others keep track of my research done on embedded devices and porting linux to them. The ToDo chunk for my holiday (20070601-20070831) follows:

1) Full opie support for palm/pxa and palm/omap devices in mainstream - DONE
All stuff was merged to opie cvs, there are also some nice pictures of various palm models upstream. I also sent a patch that fixes device/model detection. That patch was prepared in cooperation with Paul -bluelightning- Eggleton, since it turned out to be deeper problem. The devices in libopie had to be renumerated etc. Nevertheless, it will all be in Opie 1.2.3
2) WiFi support for palmld - W.I.P.
Thanks to Holger Schurig's efforts, there is now a driver for 88W8385 WiFi chipset. It is not the same as in palmld, but it is quite similar. We have 88W8305 which is much older. This doesnt matter though, it can be also handled by that driver (with some modifications). The currect status is I can communicate with the card, load firmware and get the MAC address out of it. I still cant work with the wireless part though, but this will probably be just a matter of implementing some stuff since the card is so old.
3) WiFi support for palmtx - ToDo
The chip is similar as in palmld, but newer, refer to point [2]
4) USB2 support for palmld - ToDo
I began doing research some time ago on this stuff and the result was I found out the wiring ... well ... most of it. The currect status is that I know where that chip has power and reset GPIOs, so I can turn it on and off and I also know where it has it's registers mmaped. I also managed to write testing driver that makes the chip enumerate with usb bus, but it is more of an example and proof that it somehow works.
5) Angstrom/iWMMXt - W.I.P.
Try compiling angstrom with iwmmxt optimalizations. This will be harder nut, since qemu has still some problems with running iwmmxt compiled localedef from glibc and so I cant generate binary locales. After that is fixed, I think it will be all ok. I believe that iwmmxt will give the device some speedboost. Moreover opie2 and mplayer can use it.
6) Update PalmZ71 and PalmTT - ToDo
Since last release for those two devices was half year ago and the code in omap KT is getting stinky, I think I should update those. Also there are good news for palmtt/palmtt2 because Paul Sokolovsky bought palmtt2 and he will probably work on it. This may as well result in much better mmc driver and faster running linux port for palmtt/palmtt2.
7) Release bootpacks for devices I have - ToDo
This really needs to be done, but it depends on all previous points.
8) Support for BCM2033 (PalmTT/T2) - ToDo
This would be handy afterall. Since there is support for BCM2035 and I know how to get both firmwares for this chip from palmos resource file, it may be fun to hack on this.

1 comment:

step2back said...

Marex, you have a very capable and talented people. I wanted to suggest my help with position #7 in your list. So I will try to create machine.conf 's and build images rootfs, and you check them at work.